Tencent Leases Oracle Data Centers in $7B Deal for 100,000 AI Chips

Tencent has reportedly signed a five-year, $7 billion lease agreement with Oracle to access approximately 100,000 advanced AI chips across data centers in Southeast Asia. The company paid roughly 30% upfront to secure compute capacity for training AI models and developing intelligent agent tools. This deal highlights how Chinese tech giants leverage overseas cloud infrastructure leases to access advanced hardware, such as Nvidia GPUs, that are restricted from direct export into mainland China under U.S. trade rules. It illustrates the massive capital expenditures Chinese firms are dedicating to foreign data centers to stay competitive in global AI development. The agreement spans multiple Oracle data center locations in Southeast Asia, a region where ByteDance and Alibaba are also major clients. Driven by prepayments for AI infrastructure, Tencent's second-quarter capital expenditure surged 176% year-over-year to 53 billion RMB.